Kirion rarely spoke of the mother of his child. Her name had become a shadow he chose to walk past.
But now, the past was no longer behind him—it had begun to circle back.
It started with a decrypted data fragment pulled from the Aegis servers. The daughter found it buried beneath layers of surveillance logs, tagged under an alias only Kirion recognized: "WRAITH-5."
His hands trembled as he opened the file.
A government file.
Photographs.
Interrogation transcripts.
A voice log.
Her voice.
She hadn't vanished into obscurity. She had been taken—reconditioned, retrained, repurposed. The resistance's ghost stories about a faceless government assassin weren't fiction.
They were about her.
The file ended with a final image: her standing in a hallway Kirion recognized from a top-level government facility—one that hadn't existed publicly. She was older now, colder, her eyes empty. Or maybe just hidden.
"She knew how to vanish," Kirion muttered. "But they taught her how to erase."
His daughter stood in the doorway, silent. She had read the same file hours earlier.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she asked.
He met her gaze. "Because I didn't know what to believe… and because I was afraid you'd go looking."
A long silence.
Then, quietly, she replied, "Maybe it's time we stop running from ghosts."
That night, Kirion opened a compartment in the floor of The Nest. Inside: an old data drive, unopened for years. A collection of memories—videos, voice messages, one final letter she had left him the night she walked away.
He played it.
Her voice cracked as she spoke. "This world breaks everyone, Kirion. I just broke first. Protect her. Raise her to be what we couldn't be."
He closed the file. The war was never just about governments and firewalls. It was about family, torn and tested by forces beyond their control.
Now, the family's ghosts had names again.
And they were moving closer.